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Friday, July 18, 2014

NO SUNSPOTS! Bummer

I check Space Weather pretty much every day mostly because it's interesting. I have noticed a fall off in 10 12 15 and 17 in the past couple weeks. I can hear stations but with difficulty. Yesterday the sun presented this picture:

Recorded sunspot number = 0. Today its the same story, 0. This is the first zero day in 3 years. This cycle is also very quiet, perhaps the quietest in 100 years and it seems to be trending down.

So the question is has the sunspot max been reached for this cycle? Usually when the spots are bad 160, 80 and 40 get good but they have been off also. I've only been able to work 25 countries on 80 in the past 5 weeks, mostly the old timers who have been lurking on 80 for years. 40 is a little better but not much. 20M and 30M has been the best of the bunch. I hope the trend does not continue since I have at best only a couple more cycles left in me... but then if the trend does continue I'll just need more power and better antennas.

My other favorite website for wx related info is the lightning strike tracker at Intellicast. I check this quite often since I live in lightning central USA.